On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:25:47 -0400, George
wrote:

On 6/4/2011 11:56 AM, Josh wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:36:04 -0400,
wrote:

I just added Emory Hospital as an automatic payee. Wells Fargo has no
caller ID lookup so the chances of finding the address, city, state
automatically is 0. (I suggest adding this feature every time it
comes up but all I hear are crickets)

Also automatic payments has no way to send the exact amount of the
bill. I can set up payments, and I have the option of sending them
forever until I stop them, or sending xx number of payments. South
Trust had the option of "send until you pay $$$.cc."

Because all of my bills recur monthly, I rarely have to add payees so
the amount of trouble to switch banks is more trouble than to put up
with this, so all I can do is complain.

M. I. C. K. E. Y. M. O. U. S. E bank

This is why I've always used the "pull" method of automatic payment
(where you authorize the utility/school/credit card/etc to initiate an
ACH transfer each month for the bill amount), instead of the "push"
method of these bill-pay systems. I'd see if the hospital can set
that up if these are ongoing bills.

I've done this for all my recurring bills for 15+ years and never had
a problem with a bad withdrawal -- on the contrary, the one time I
tried to use "bill pay" several years ago with my credit union to pay
the rent I couldn't have autopayed via pull, on the third month they
took the money out of my account...and never sent it to the rental
agency. They did take responsibility, and refunded it along with the
late charge I paid the agency immediately, but I gave up after that.
Too much room for error/finger pointing, where with ACH withdrawal, if
the statement says "PG&E ACH $16.85", that's proof that PG&E received
that amount.

In the end, if the company pulling the money is legit, they're only
going to take what they should. If they're not...well, anyone with
your account and routing number (including someone you "bill pay" to)
can initiate a fraudulent payment anyway, so you don't really have any
more protection.

Josh

I would never ever give anyone the keys to my bank account. All
disbursements are made by me and I can think of a number of occasions
why that makes sense.

Anyone you've ever written a check to has the "keys to your bank
account" already -- the routing number for the bank and the account
number. The vendor doesn't send anything beyond that (and the amount,
of course) to the ACH system; they keep your authorizations on file,
of course, but that doesn't prevent unauthorized transactions until
it's done, you complain and your bank investigates.



We use natural gas for heating/cooking/water heating. The highest bill
we ever had was ~ 160.00 There was bad weather so they didn't read the
meters and delivered estimated billing. Only little problem was they
delivered a bill for almost $700. If they could take whatever money they
wanted they would have caused other payments to fail since I only keep
sufficient money to pay bills in the account. Since I am in control of
my checkbook I called them and asked how much I really owed them and
they played the part of the 900lb gorilla and told me $690. I refused to
pay unless they gave me a reasonable estimate so the "supervisor" had a
powwow with someone and decided $150 would work.

I always receive a bill to review showing the amount to be pulled,
either online or paper -- the "pull" doesn't happen until the due date
a few weeks later. If the amount isn't correct, there's time to get
the utility etc to correct it, or to call the bank to get them to
block that specific ACH attempt (or just empty your account :-)

Josh